COBECORE project accepted for funding

Past September (2016) we wrote the “Congo basin eco-climatological data recovery and valorisation” or COBECORE proposal together with several partners building upon and inspired by the success of the Jungle Rhythms project. The Jungle Rhythms uses citizen science to transcribe old colonial records of tree phenology (seasonal changes in the state of the tree). The project illustrates nicely that historical data can still hold significant value for current day research, and data which seem out of reach due to the challenging nature of transcription can be tackled with the generous help of citizen scientists.

Given this notion, we expanded upon the basic idea of Jungle Rhythms in order to digitize and transcribe further historical colonial records of eco-climatological importance as stored in the state archives in Brussels.

Although the competition was stiff in the thematic axis 3 & 6 (cultural, historical and scientific heritage) with close to 90 submissions and a rather rough 16% success rate, the project was still selected! We are therefor happy to announce the informal start of the COBECORE project.